No more stress with interior design. Open Book is the cure

When a company grows there finally comes a time to rebuild its office. How? Look for a new location? Or maybe just do a general overhaul? How much would it cost? How to find trusted advisors? How to choose the right partner? All those questions cause one thing: stress.

Delivery of the recently opened offices of JLL, Stanley Black & Decker, MMC or Sage is a proof that fit-out projects can be done smoothly if we reduce risks in several areas: budget, time and quality. The above can be assured by a simple procedure – an Open Book approach.

“Open Book means total cost transparency from the very beginning of the project. This allows the client to have full knowledge of the prices of all the products and services. Also, the client agrees with the contractor on a specific margin, which is then added to each invoice,” says Paweł Brodzik, managing director of Tétris.

“It is the most transparent investment process you can imagine. The investor not only knows what the project consists of but also takes decisions when choosing subcontractors,” adds Rajmund Węgrzynek, managing director of Tétris.

Gross Maximum Price means client’s safety

Open Book is not a new practice among Polish fit-out companies. However, what makes it so revolutionary today, is the new approach promoted by Tétris: combining transparency of the costs with working on the Gross Maximum Price basis. This means that the fit-out company guarantees that in case the estimated budget is exceeded, the costs will be covered by the contractor. This requires great expertise on the side of the contractor, while the client can verify the prices with support of an external advisor.

This solution gives the best result when there is just one subcontractor responsible for both design and building works. It is time-saving for the client and helps avoid frequent misunderstandings between the author of the design and the construction team.

“Our biggest challenge was time. We signed the contract in January 2016 and we moved in in September. We only had seven months to design, build and finish the interior. For the space of 4,500 sqm it is a huge task, that is why timing was our core issue,” says Jacek Białas, EMEA Business Service Director Stanley Black & Decker.

Budget under control. Time for savings?

The Open Book approach is, in other words, a method allowing the client to check the status of their new interior at every stage. When the client’s and the subcontractor’s budgets are transparent and everything is calculated, we have a situation when cost estimates meet real values and it’s time for optimizing.

“At every stage we knew perfectly well how much each of the proposed options would cost, and how it would impact the cost of the entire project. I would like to mention that our project has been completed below the estimated cost,” adds Jacek Białas, EMEA Business Service Director Stanley Black & Decker.

Paweł Brodzik, managing director of Tétris, confirms that it is not a stand-alone case. “It happened that the client gave us 50 percent of the sum saved in Value Engineering as additional remuneration for the great result we delivered.”

More on the Open Book approach in the interview with Paweł Brodzik in the latest issue of Warsaw Business Journal.

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